Here from three experts on education policy, is an idea for "reinventing" American public education. The idea is simple, neat, and familiar: have school boards cease to operate schools directly and instead contract with private (not-for-profit or for-profit) organizations to provide day-to-day schooling. That is, arrange for schools to work the way the selection of textbooks now does. School boards do not design and print texts; they decide what they want and then choose from the offerings of vendors. If after a year or two a text is found wanting, another is readily at hand to replace it. The wishes of school boards profoundly affect what publishers print. There is synergy here, hardly perfect but demonstrably better than any available alternative. This arrangement allows for choices among competing texts, is flexible, and leaves room for experimentation. It keeps the boards away from the nuts and bolts of publishing, allowing them to concentrate on other matters. It permits decisive, orderly changes in educational approach.
If such a policy were extended from textbooks to the design and operation of whole schools, boards of education would start by setting the scope and standards of the educational offerings they wanted. They would then solicit bids from providers, select one or several, and write contracts with each. From that point forward the detailed operation of a school, or a cluster of schools, would be in the hands of the contractor, though shaped by the contract. The school boards could focus their attention on overall policy rather than on micromanaging individual schools. Contracts would come up for renewal periodically, giving the school board the option of staying the course, modestly or substantially changing it, or starting anew.

All this is familiar American practice. Many public or quasi-public entities contract for much of their work: school districts hire Marriott to operate their cafeterias; the U.S. Postal Service asks Delta and American to haul mail; city and town governments contract with builders to construct public buildings. There have been several, albeit halting, attempts to run public schools under contract, but these have been essentially limited management contracts, not freshly focused and bold reconceptions of what a good modern education should entail.

So, then, what makes this orderly, familiar, and thus presumably uncontroversial proposal a "reinvention"? Some will predict the apocalypse: privatization! They forget that publicly directed bodies unilaterally write the specifications for contract schools. More critics will predict "union-bashing." They overlook the fact that progressive district leaders and unions across the country have already joined in launching new schools that are largely free from traditional regulation. Yet other critics will see contract schools as devices for segregation. They forget that (alas) many metropolitan regions are already profoundly segregated. Contract schools will not necessarily affect this one way or the other.

The book's title reminds us how profoundly we are stuck even in the way we think about schooling and learning. We assume that formal education will be delivered by professionals working inside rectangular classrooms within buildings that together with similar buildings elsewhere in the community make up a system. We assume that such systems, whatever their size, are an important expression of democracy, reflecting the wishes of their communities.

However, even as these systems have had to deal with growing numbers of ever more diverse children, they have clung to their routines, inevitably making public education, the authors say, "more rule-bound, rights-driven, and divided into specialties." And, they continue, by centralizing decision-making in district offices, courts, and state departments of education, "we have weakened schools as organizations." Many districts are now enormous enterprises, enormously complex and thus rigid. There are currently more children enrolled in the New York City public schools than there are citizens in Rhode Island.

And we keep thinking that "public education" is necessarily, inevitably, the same thing as those enterprises. What they consider to be education becomes what is offered in the classroom; people's hopes for and commitment to their children are properly synthesized and then expressed through bureaucracies and their political chiefs. We find ourselves trapped by a conception of schools that is appealingly noble but demonstrably impractical. We are dominated by what the authors call an "organizational frame of mind" -- one that makes any examination of the most efficacious ways and means of educating our children apostate, unthinkable. "Educators' habits of operating as bureaucrats under regulation are deeply ingrained," the authors say. Hence this book's argument for reinvention.

HILL, Pierce, and Guthrie exhaustively describe how a contract system might work. They deal with the practicalities, knowing full well that to avoid them would allow the book to be dismissed as pie in the sky. A long appendix deals with a wide range of questions about precisely how a contract would function. The authors are good and patient explainers. They are persuasive: all this can be made to work. This book isn't Rousseau's Emile. It is a highly sophisticated field manual, along with an argument for the importance of its message. It is likely, therefore, to be effective. Reinvention will come, sooner or later.

The authors write,

Americans quite properly seek public schools that both respect the rights and values of a diverse population and make the most of the talents and initiative of individual students and teachers. Unfortunately, the rules, regulations, and bureaucratic machinery created to attend to the first of these goals threaten to overwhelm the second. The result: a system that works for very few.

Few believe any more that the failure is the result merely of bad leadership. What is striking about the past two decades, particularly in urban American school districts, is both the high quality and determination of many leaders in education and the strict limitations that are placed on their ability to improve the performance of their students. If it isn't the people who are the problem, it must be the system. A growing number of influential Americans understand that.

Contract schools, as the authors describe them, give substantial power to the people holding the contracts. Once they have their marching orders, they are to be left largely alone. There are today dozens of such nominally "public" schools, places that are deliberately self-governing, close to and in league with the parents of their students -- but whose "contracts" have come about because of inattention or desperation (many of these schools serve the poor) or through deliberate benign conspiracy. They are "upstart" schools, and the best of them work profoundly well, as the school reformer Deborah Meier has movingly described in (1995). Some state governments have authorized the creation of charter schools (whose charters are, for all intents and purposes, contracts). Some cities have done likewise: Boston's pilot schools, for example, are creatures of that city's collective-bargaining agreement with its teachers. Usually such innovations are bitterly fought by those accustomed to controlling the established system: they are properly seen as true reinventions. As these schools grow in number and build up strong track records, the down-to-earth contracting ideas of Hill, Pierce, and Guthrie will seem ever more mainstream.

More difficult for the existing system to absorb is the notion that, as the authors put it, "schools will have to differ in their goals and approaches." That is, there cannot be One Best System (to quote from the title of David Tyack's careful history of Americans' pursuit of universal education). Government must learn to trust the people, and in education the people deserving disproportionate authority are the parents of the children in question. If there were a variety of contract schools in a district (an approach the authors applaud) and parents could choose among them, then children in that district would have the opportunity to attend different sorts of good schools. A market would operate, with those schools that failed to win favor going out of business and being replaced by schools more attractive to consumers. This would be true reinvention, with emphasis on the "re-": American public education started some 150 years ago with small, locally controlled, and responsive schools (for better or worse) -- classic "upstart" schools.

Of course, we live in times quite different from those of Horace Mann. The nationalizing agencies of informal education, which teach the young about life, are now numerous and extraordinarily powerful -- and none more so than the mass media. The homogenizing force of these agencies would astonish the founders of the American public school. The argument for collective institutions close to the people they serve has, therefore, new legitimacy, even if the leaders of school systems can't acknowledge it. The slow breakup of huge school systems is under way, peppered by contrary-seeming policy initiatives (such as detailed state-dictated curricula) derived from the days of the "administrative progressives."

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Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.